Prisoner Was Handcuffed, Guarded : Planted Gun Blamed in Escape

Orange County Sheriff’s Department officials believe the escape this week of a County Jail inmate from UCI Medical Center was an “aberration” and would have been difficult to prevent.

Lt. Dick Olson, a sheriff’s spokesman, said Friday that such incidents are rare. He added that the prisoner was able to escape Thursday because he had a gun that had been planted by an accomplice.

Michael Wayde Mohon, 38, who was awaiting trial for the attempted murder of a Fountain Valley policeman, disarmed the deputy who had taken him to an afternoon appointment at the medical center and got away in a pickup truck, Olson said. Mohon is still at large.

The prisoner was handcuffed and had his right arm in a cast when he grabbed the gun that had been hidden in the hospital parking lot, forced the deputy to give up his revolver and fled, Assistant Sheriff Dennis LaDucer said Friday.

“This is an unusual case. . . . There’s always a possibility that someone could come and rescue a prisoner,” he added. “It’s difficult to foresee all of the possible things that could happen.”

Will Mohon’s escape prompt any changes in security methods?

“Any incident like this causes us to look again at our procedures,” LaDucer said, adding:

“We don’t want people to escape, and we will look at what happened to see if there are ways we can beef up our procedures. But right now, our initial assessment is that it was an aberration in the system that caused it to happen.”

Olson said deputies were following routine security procedures when they took Mohon from the County Jail to a regular physical therapy session at UCI.

Typically, prisoners with medical appointments are handcuffed to chains at the waist and driven in locked vans to the hospital. Each prisoner is accompanied by an armed deputy. Prisoners taken to court appearances are kept under similar security, LaDucer said.

Mohon’s right hand was in a cast as a result of a shoot-out with a Fountain Valley police officer in 1983, so only his left hand could be handcuffed to the chain around his waist, LaDucer said.

The prisoner would have been able to grab a hidden gun and escape, even if both hands had been restrained, LaDucer said.

“Our belief is that he (Mohon) bent down, reached for a gun that was located somewhere close by--in a wall or, we think, it may have been close to a fire hose,” he said. “He probably could have got that gun even if he had been handcuffed around the cast.”

Sheriff’s deputies already observe “tight security” in transporting prisoners to medical appointments and court appearances, LaDucer said. He said he questioned whether precautions could be increased.

“If we really thought about it, the only way to really prevent (such an escape) is to have one guy with a shotgun, and another guy with a gun pointed at a prisoner,” LaDucer said. “But it wouldn’t be safe to do it that way--to walk around in public places with guns pointed at people who are handcuffed. That would be ridiculous.”

Evelyn Andamo, chief of rehabilitative services in the medical center’s occupational therapy department, praised the security precautions taken with jail outpatients. She said deputies watch their prisoners closely.

“The guard goes hand in hand with the patient, and the patient is guarded right where they are being treated,” she said.

“We’ve had no problems at all. They (prisoners) are handcuffed, and if one hand is being treated . . . the other hand is still handcuffed throughout the procedure.”

Olson could not say how many Orange County Jail inmates have escaped from custody during medical appointments, but he said such incidents are few and far between, despite a growing number of prisoners being transported by deputies.

In 1983, for example, deputies took County Jail inmates to 199,000 court and medical appointments, Olson said. Last year, the number was 224,584.

“We don’t keep hard statistics on this (the number of escapes). But in the time I’ve been here, I can’t remember one,” said Olson, who has been the department’s spokesman for one year.

“It just doesn’t happen very often.”